Life Goes On in a Town Called -- What?

And as homes and farms were abandoned, the forest returned: Estimates are that Vermont was about three-fourths cleared in the mid-1800s and now is about three-fourths wooded.

Hescock demonstrated this by driving the road that used to lead to one of Podunk's biggest cleared farms. It is still lined by the old stone walls, but now ruts and low-hanging limbs make the way nearly impassable.

"You can see how the forestation is just -- whoops! There goes my antenna," Hescock said, as a branch pulled a magnetically mounted radio antenna off the hood of his SUV.

All that's left in Podunk now are 50 or so full-time residents, a roughly equal number of livestock, the decaying schoolhouse, and Upper and Lower Podunk roads. Residents of the area say they've often been surprised to walk in the woods and see stone walls, gaping cellar holes or other traces of the community that once was here.

"You wound find occasionally a cemetery in the middle of nowhere . . . three headstones and a falling-down fence," said Sarah Wolfe, a former New Yorker who moved to Podunk in 1991 and then left for a slightly bigger Vermont town in 1999.

Also remaining, of course, is the name. Residents say that, while Podunk sounds normal to them, it can be funny to catalogue-company phone operators, tourists and other people hearing it for the first time.

"You actually live in Podunk?" they ask Barry LaMarche, who lives on Upper Podunk Road. "I say, 'Yes, I do.' I don't get offended by it," he said.

"It's a good chuckle, you know."

Similar declines also affected a few of the country's other Podunks, as tiny farming communities across the North and East became less viable in the age of the railroad and then of the automobile. Officials in Michigan said the remnants of their two Podunks are an old dance hall and a lake, respectively. New York's Podunk, part of the Finger Lakes town of Ulysses, has dwindled down to eight or nine houses, an official there said.

Connecticut's Podunk, in the town of Guilford, has been affected by the opposite menace to small-town life: urbanization. In the past few years, it's been covered by a new subdivision with 30 or 40 homes, said municipal historian Joel E. Helander.

"A sea of houses," Helander said. "And I will tell you, it's hard to go back."

Now, a similar trend is beginning to threaten the essence of Vermont's Podunk as well. In the past decade, large new homes have begun to be built along both Upper and Lower Podunk roads, vacation places for people who ski at the nearby Mount Snow and Stratton Mountain resorts.

The newcomers are the kind of people who put hand-painted signs with the family name out front -- people who don't know their neighbors, or the story of the place they've bought in to.

"The people that come in here wouldn't have any clue as to where Podunk is," Hescock said.